alt Hacker NewsThat's great, but also Mastodon is just there and has been for quite some time. I see no added value in Bluesky/ATProto beyond the layer of that "social as a service" which looks like a walled garden / app store of sorts in the making. I may be wrong, of course...
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Mastodon isn't doing anything similar!
Mastodon is just a bunch of isolated copies of the same app talking to each other. There is no notion of a shared identity, each server's admin is effectively a king over your account, etc. It's a fragmented patchwork of isolated sites that forward messages.
With AT, there is just one global network. Like the web. You don't post "to" someone's isolated copy of an app. You post to your own folder, and every interested app can aggregate your post.
It's a bit like email vs RSS. Very different shapes.
To give you a concrete example to ground it. Blacksky is a fork of Bluesky. They're setting up their own server with different moderation policies and are unbanning some people that Bluesky has banned (https://bsky.app/profile/rude1.blacksky.team/post/3mcozwdhjo...). However, Blacksky posts still exist in the same "world" as Bluesky--they are not an isolated fragment.
Thanks to AT, Blacksky and Bluesky are just two different prisms through which you see a single network. Whereas with Mastodon, every app is its own network, with some limited message passing between them.
I never managed to get into mastodon because mastodon isn't a single space. It's a bunch of separate, linked spaces. Which server you're on matters a lot, and I never found one that really had the vibe I was looking for.
Bluesky, though, is one big pool. There's no seam between servers. The experience is much nicer.
Also, bluesky caught on among my peers in a way that mastodon never did, which was always going to be the deciding factor. I imagine not having to "choose a server" was a big part of that.